


don't leave me to bleed

by supinetothestars



Category: Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Clint Barton & Kate Bishop Friendship, Found Family, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Mental Health Issues, Protective Kate Bishop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-15
Updated: 2020-06-15
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:34:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24737755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/supinetothestars/pseuds/supinetothestars
Summary: When he first worked with Natasha she asked him how he did it. It was on a mission, a stakeout gone wrong, right after Clint’s shoulder had been shot twice as he saved two hostages from captivity - and that night she asked him a question she perhaps expected him not to understand: “How do you know to do it?”Clint had been silent for a long moment. “It’s like this,” he’d began. “It’s that, people like you and me, we’re fucked up, right? When we were growing up people took our heads and messed with ‘em. When I was a kid, all I knew was fucked up shit. My old man, he - all I knew was fucked up shit. But that makes a shitty superhero. So I don’t try to do what I know. I just think about would someone else would do.”“Who?” She’d asked.He’d shrugged. “Up to you. Captain America, maybe.”“How does he know?”“Truth be told I don’t think he does,” Clint had said. “Bet he’s just doing what his ma told him to do.”It was true, as Steve would tell Clint an eternity later. He learned everything he knew from his ma. “What about you?” He’d asked. “What’d you learn?”“How to put makeup on a bruised eye so no one knows it’s black and blue,” Clint had told him. “Oh, and killer pancakes.”
Relationships: Clint Barton & Kate Bishop
Comments: 4
Kudos: 41





	don't leave me to bleed

Clint Barton doesn’t think much of the Hawkeye name.

It’s not dislike. It’s not dismissal, not disrespect. It’s just that Hawkeye, like most facets of Barton’s life, doesn’t feel entirely _his._ It’s an ideal, a standard, another expectation for him to not quite live up to. Another pressing weight on his shoulders, another set of booted purple shoes to fill.

And that’s alright. Clint isn’t much without other people’s shoes to step into. That’s how he grew into himself, how he shaped his fledgeling, flailing younger self into something resembling a human being. He would wake up every morning of his early days working for Shield, feel the stillness in his chest where an ache of hunger used to be, and step into the role of Captain America. Of Superman. Of Robin or any of the brave-hearted children’s superheroes who had graced his television screen as a child. This was how he found his way forward. 

When he first worked with Natasha, right after she left the KGB, she asked him how he did it. It was on a mission, a stakeout gone wrong, right after Clint’s shoulder had been shot twice as he saved two hostages from captivity - and that night she asked him a question she perhaps expected him not to understand: “How do you know to do it?”

Clint had been silent for a long moment. “It’s like this,” he’d began, finally - “It’s that, people like you and me, we’re fucked up, right? When we were growing up people took our heads and messed with ‘em. When I was a kid, all I knew was fucked up shit. My old man, he - all I knew was fucked up shit. But that makes a shitty superhero. So I don’t try to do what I know. I just think about would someone else would do and try my best.”

“Who?” She’d asked.

He’d shrugged. “Up to you. Someone. Captain America, maybe.”

She’d been silent for a long moment. “How does he know?”

“Truth be told I don’t think he does,” Clint had said. “Bet he’s just doing what his ma told him to do.”

It was true, as Steve would tell Clint an eternity later. He learned everything he knew from his ma. “What about you?” He’d asked. “What’d you learn?”  
“How to put makeup on a bruised eye so no one knows it’s black and blue,” Clint had told him. “Oh, and killer pancakes.”

Here’s the other reason Clint doesn’t think much of the Hawkeye name: as he puts it, it’s trading cheap. “Doesn’t take half a brain cell for someone to become a Hawkeye in this economy,” he told Kate once. “Damn, I mean, there’s me ‘n you and Barney for a little bit there and we still don’t have any fuckin sense between the three of us.”  
This was true, but it was also calculated, also purposeful: he wanted to devalue Kate’s interpretation of the Hawkeye title. Because his worst fear and deepest nightmare, upon first discovering that Kate had taken up the name Hawkeye, was that she would deign to try and fill his shoes as well as his name and find them horribly ill-fitting from years of disuse. Because Clint wasn’t the role model Kate needed in life, and neither was Hawkeye. Hawkeye was no superhero, no comic book protagonist with footsteps for a naive young do-gooder to clumsily stumble after in the manner of adolescent Clint’s idolization of Captain America. Hawkeye was Barney Barton trading on his brother’s name for cash. Hawkeye was an exhausted Clint, too drunk on lack of sleep to function, fucking up a thousand Shield missions a thousand times in a row. Hawkeye was the guilty party in a dozen failed relationships and nearly as many court cases, and somewhere, in his heart of hearts, Hawkeye was just a scared little kid in a circus taking up sharpshooting and becoming another of the carnival’s card tricks.

Kate was none of these things, would become none of things, should aspire to none of these things. She was young, she was good, she had a proper moral compass rather than the scribbled lines in the dirt Clint was left to interpret. So he did his best to whittle Hawkeye down to a moniker, an inside joke. A funny bit of self deprecating wordplay rather than the crushing, soul stifling weight of responsibility that Clint had often been forced to carry.

Kate seemed to get it. She knew what she was doing, knew her way about taking up the title without tracing Clint’s exhausted footsteps. Like Clint, she had been shaped by world of cruelty growing up, but where Clint’s struggles had left him blindly wandering in the dark, anticipating the world would whisk from under him at every mistaken footstep, Kate’s struggles had left her sure-footed, quick stepping, certain of her path towards justice as she fought under the Hawkeye name. She needed no moral footsteps to follow, and even if she had - perhaps she could tell Clint’s didn’t mark the path to take.

 _Okay,_ Clint had thought. _She knows where she’s going. So I’ll just help weary the path, a little. Beat out the underbrush. Help her on her way._

 _Help her on her way,_ he’d said. _Train her, help her, save her, befriend her,_ he’d meant.

 _Be taught, be saved, be befriended, be loved,_ she’d responded.

And wait! This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. He’d meant a mentorship, a brief apprenticeship. He’d meant for her to go on her way, so she wouldn’t be dragged down by his. But Kate - glorious, badass, optimistic, hard-to-be-rid-of Kate - found a way to bend their paths at the middle so they’d journey on together. Having a traveling mate, Clint discovered, was endlessly superior to running blindly through the underbrush in search of a Captain America’s ideal. And Kate, he found, was like the boomerang arrow he’d used to trick audiences in the circus. She comes back to him, in the end.

He asks her once, after a fight where she’d submitted to be held at gunpoint to save a crew of hostages, how she did it. How she knew what to do. How to act, how to fill the footsteps of the superhero’s role she’d built for herself.

“I don’t think I do,” she says. “I don’t think anyone knows, like, how to be a superhero, right? It’s - your goal can’t be the superheroing bit. Your goal can’t be the ‘act like an Avenger’ because that’s fake as shit and half the Avengers are dumbasses, anyway. You just want to save people so you focus on that and let the rest fall away.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Clint says. “Of course, the end goal is saving people. But how do you know how to get to that goal? How do you fucking get there, if it feels like you’re so fucked up you see the world in moral grays and not like some futzing superhero, some cartoon character, If everything you do blindly running towards justice could end up trampling people’s lives underfoot, it doesn’t get so simple, does it? And if everything you’ve known, everything you’ve been taught, is how to hurt - feel it, cause it, watch it - it’s not so simple, Katie. It’s not so futzing simple.”

“Oh,” is all she says. And she’s silent for a long time before continuing. 

“I just think,” she continues quietly, “that maybe that’s part of it. Maybe the worrying that you’re hurting people all the time - it’s part of being responsible for the mixed consequences, right? It’s when you feel all that happens as a result of your actions and not just the good shit, that’s how you do a good job and don’t become a Punisher who goes around mowing people down for the greater good. And you - you gotta be fighting from the right place, too. Like, I know people like the Punisher, and they’re not fighting from a place of loving the world and wanting it to be better, they’re fighting from a place of hurt. And in the end all they do is hurt. I mean - I’ve been through some shit, and it’s why I started fighting. I wanted to make sure I couldn’t be hurt again. But I had to deal with all that pain before I started fighting because I knew if I didn’t put it elsewhere from the fighting I’d become another Punisher or-”

Or Barton Sr., Clint thinks.

“You know,” she finishes. “Self-destructive, violent, you get the archetype.”

Were Clint a tad bit edgier he’d hinge on becoming the archetype.

_Fight from a place of love,_ he thinks she’s trying to say. _Fight from a place of love, not hurt, and accept that feeling shitty about the bad things is a part of being one of the good things._

Easier said than done. For one, Clint’s not very good at _love_ , much less fighting with it. It’s hereditary, he thinks. His earliest memories of love come from his brother, who taught him to fight in the backyard of their dratty little one-story by beating the shit out of him until he learned to protect himself. In those days, the love and the pain of their encounters were indistinguishable. In the decades since, things have gotten no clearer. Barney is the reverse of Kate’s boomerang arrow: he’ll always be there, and he’ll always leave. Nastily, hurtfully, trust-breakingly, and with the knowledge he’ll be back to do it again in a season or two. Like Clint, Barton’s loves and hurts his brother interchangeably.

The more he thinks about this the more Clint realizes he does it with all of his family. This fact is highlighted a year later, when Clint’s friend Gil is shot by tracksuits and Kate finds herself unable to pull Clint from the abyss through the ever-thickening fog of his mental state. When she instead finds herself being dragged down by her attempts to save him, she pulls up roots for a summer spent at the West coast, free of his weight on her shoulders.

Without her lantern to light his path Clint continues to sink. Barney returns, and saves Clint’s life a dozen times to match the times he’s nearly taken it. 

That is the summer Clint comes to three very important realizations.

Firstly, that perhaps not so many people would have left him if he hadn’t shown them to the door and set them on their way in expectation they would abandon him regardless. His girlfriend Jess, for one, seems to appreciate this realization.

Secondly, that Kate is as he suspected a boomerang arrow, and bounces back to him in the end.

And thirdly - perhaps most importantly - is that Clint’s first family was shaped by nothing but hurt and the exchanging of pain. But Clint’s first family is not his only family, nor his best.

Kate, Jess, Lucky, Barney, Natasha. 

This family, Clint suspects, has a chance at doing better.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed this rambly unedited attempt at character study! If you did, leave kudos and comments, because I have zero motivation and crave validation!


End file.
